What is written
by irnan
Summary: Mary's whole body freezes up when she sees John sprawled across the sofa in front of the television, but somehow she still manages to yell "John! John, for God's sake, wake up!" before she turns and bolts for Sammy's bedroom. -- AU for Pilot
1. Chapter 1

_This is a disclaimer._

**What is written**

Mary couldn't ever remember being in this much pain. Not even during labour, for God's sake. Every movement, however slight, seemed to tear new rips in her stomach and pull the skin away from her bones; if she sat up and looked down, she'd find gaping flaps of flesh hanging open on either side of her belly. She forced her eyes open, blinking at the sudden light, wet her lips - or tried to. Her mouth was bone-dry, and her throat ached.

Right. Let's take this one step at a time.

She was alive. That much was obvious from the pain she was in. She was lying on her back. Mattress? Likely. Not _her_ mattress, though; not her bed, the bed she shared with John. The bed she'd woken up in when Sammy had cried -

Oh, good God. Sammy! Dean!

Sitting up was the biggest mistake she'd _ever_ made in her _life_.

* * *

The next time she swam into consciousness, John was there by her bed, holding her hand and talking softly. She couldn't focus; her thoughts shuffled along at the speed of Boris Karloff in a mummy costume, and Mary was almost convinced she'd been wrapped in cotton wool at some point.

Hmm. Drugs. Super.

John's voice. John's warm gravelly voice, his accent, his intonation. John's voice.

"... boys are gonna be fine. Sammy's got some scarring on his arm, his left one, but the docs say it'll heal well. Dean's equal parts worried about you and pissed that his bedroom caught fire and he lost all his toys..."

Mary summoned every ounce of concentration and willpower she had, and squeezed his fingers.

"Mary? Mary, can you hear me, love?"

She slid back into sleep as he bent over her, stubble quickly becoming beard, rings under his eyes looking as if they'd been stamped there, worried and hopeful.

* * *

They took her off the drugs a few days later, and she regretted it instantly, pain lancing through her, practically immobilising her. She got morphine, of course, but it had nowhere near the effects of those sedatives.

"No more sudden movements, OK?" John said, and Mary laughed, hoarse and sore. "I'll do my best."That was the first day she saw the boys. Sammy's arm was bandaged still; he was quiet and solemn in his Dad's arms as Mary gingerly bent over to kiss him. Dean was worse, pale and wide-eyed. He clung to her hand tightly and said next to nothing; but John told her afterwards that night was the first since the fire that he hadn't had nightmares.

The doctor – Mary was too tired and drugged-up to remember his name – was quiet, sorrowful, apologetic.

"I truly am sorry, Mrs. Winchester. The wound went too deep – you'll carry a scar always, and it seems – well, it's unlikely you'll be able to bear another child."

"We were stoppin' at two anyway," John said, trying to comfort her, reassure her. Mary bit her lip, twined her fingers through his.

"Well. You know. There will always be a part of me that – that wants half-a-dozen of your babies."

John kissed her, forcing back a hot swoop of grief in his stomach. Mary twisted her fingers into his hard, all the real contact they could have right then, and suddenly anger overtook her grief and, yes, disappointment.

"I don't like other people making my choices for me," she whispered fiercely.

The doctor slipped out after that, wondering what the hell she meant by 'other people'.

* * *

"Did you see him? The man with yellow eyes?"

Very early in the morning. Dawn light drifting through the blinds on the window; John was lying alongside her now, cradling her carefully against him.

"No," he said quietly. "I saw you - I saw you on-"

"The wall. My head hit the ceiling before I - before I fell."

"How can you be so calm about it? You mighta died. If you hadn't shouted at me on the stairs - if I hadn't been so close behind you -"

She turned her head against his shoulder, breathed him in, hands curling tightly in his shirt. He gripped her tight as he dared, mindful of her injury.

"I know him," she told his shoulder. "I've seen him before. In my nightmares, when I was a kid, back home in England."

"A man with yellow eyes," John repeated, soft and slow, and suddenly Mary felt a tremor of nervousness run through her.

"You – you do believe me? I'm not going crazy?"

John kissed her forehead. "I believe you. I saw you fall, d'you remember? I caught you. Something did that to you, love. Something – Jesus. Some _thing_."

"He was there for Sam," Mary whispered. "He was standing over his crib."

"We'll find out what the fuck is goin' on. I promise."

* * *

A week later, she came home – well, sort of.

"Like I said, there wasn't much to salvage," John said, almost apologetically, as they made their way up the stairs to the new apartment. "Soot and water pretty much ruined what hadn't burned."

"John –" Mary stopped to catch her breath, press a hand against the bandages winding around her waist like a hideous belt – "John, as long as you're there, and the boys, I couldn't give a damn."

He pressed a kiss into the hair above her temple, hand in the small of her back steadying her as he opened the front door. The babysitter slipped out unnoticed as Mary, ignoring her husband's protests, sank to her knees in the doorway to wrap her arms around their oldest son.

Dean was as warm and wriggly in her arms as ever, but more clingy; the few times she'd seen him at the hospital, she hadn't been able to hug him at all, and dull discomfort in her abdomen or no, she was perfectly happy to spend the next hour crouched on the floor like this, just holding him.

Then Sammy cried, and Dean tugged her up, laughing. "Come see our room, Mommy. Sammy and me got one to share, and Daddy says –"

"Daddy says be gentle with your Mom, kiddo," John said firmly. "She's still a bit hurt."

Dean looked up, bottom lip caught between his teeth. "I didn't hurt you, did I?"

"Dean," she said, "hugging you is worth all the hurts in the world, my darling boy."

The only thing better than the way his face lit up at her words was Sammy's warmth cradled against her again, snuggly and smelling of baby powder and milk and summer days. He gurgled up at her like she'd never been away, and waved a tiny fist at her enthusiastically. Mary held him tight, remembering the awful fear that had torn through her when she'd seen the stranger in his room with him. Dean was yawning on the couch beside her, head on her shoulder, and soon both the boys were fast asleep, snuggled against their Mommy.

John carried them both to bed, slow and careful not to wake them. Mary could hear him murmur a 'good night', tuck Dean in, snap the dim nightlight on. Then he was back with her, taking Dean's place and shifting them so that they were lying the length of the couch, her body tucked between him and the back of it, half on top of him.

Mary pressed her face into his the curve of his shoulder and neck in a gesture almost as old as their relationship, and breathed in the smell of home.

"Tell me about the nightmares," he said, a breath of air across the top of her head.

She shivered. "You first. Tell me what happened when I – after he –"

"You fell," he told her, soft and slow. "I mean, I was right behind you – heard you shout something – then, when I got inside the room, you were already – well, you know. I didn't see anything else... maybe it left because I crashed in when I did. You fell, and I caught you – you'd passed out by then, you were bleeding, but at the same time, exactly the same time, as I caught you the room went up. Started just behind Sam's crib –"

"You left me," she said.

John drew her closer, nodded wordlessly. Mary clung to him, unable to imagine being faced with the agony of that choice: to save her son from a fire that had come out of nowhere or help her husband before he bled to death in her arms.

"I gave Sammy to Dean," John continued. "Told him to get outta the house. Then I went back, carried you out."

"And the house exploded?"

"Sam's nursery sure did. Not just the windows, but most of the wall and roof over it, too."

"We weren't supposed to get out alive," Mary murmured. "He threw a tantrum."

John twisted awkwardly so he could see her face. "Why d'you say that?"

She shrugged sleepily. "I don't know. It just feels... it just feels true. I was supposed to die, and you saved me."

He chuckled hoarsely. "I love you." Simple statement of fact, explanation, sacred vow.

"There's a parallel universe out there where I died," Mary whispered; she didn't know why the thought took hold of her the way it did, but there were goosebumps running up her arms and a cold pit opening in her stomach. Under her scars.

John tangled a hand in her hair and pulled her head up to his, kissed her properly for the first time in over a month, lingering taste of curry when she parted her lips and welcomed him in with a little moan. He shifted a bit so that they were facing each other, gathered her tight against him, one hand at her back, the other drifting down her leg as they kissed, light brush over her knee and then back up to settle just beneath her ass, curling his big hand around her too-skinny thigh.

Mary raked a hand through his hair, holding his mouth to hers, pressing up against him till there was barely room for a breath of air between them, heat coiling inside her at his touch and taste and the slow lick of his tongue into her mouth. She wanted skin-on-skin and _ohgodplease _and her nails raking down his back while he sucked bruises into her neck and ran his hand heavy and possessive down her body with a sudden desperation that didn't surprise her in the least.

She'd nearly died. They'd nearly lost this for good, this heat, this passion between them. This perfection.

But then John's hand wound its way under her shirt, caressing warm skin _Johnyesmore_ before encountering the bandages, and he stopped, pulled back, hands smoothing through her hair, cupping her face even as she reached up to take his mouth back.

"Mary – Mary, you're still hurt..."

Mary let out a hiss of pure frustration, tangled round him, leg curled over his thigh. It took quite a bit of concentration to unwrap her hand from his bicep, from his bare flesh. "Right. That's _it_. No touching till those things come off for good. I can't stand this."

The bastard _laughed_ at her. She'd kill him tomorrow, after he'd carried her to bed and helped her get her clothes off and gone to clean up the kitchen and taken Dean to preschool and fed Sammy and... yeah. Maybe not. Maybe.

* * *

Every time Mary left the apartment – for groceries, for doctor's check-ups, for Dean's pre-school – she had to stop herself peering deep into the eyes of everyone she met, searching for a glint of yellow.

There was an itch between her shoulder-blades, an unease in her stomach, a bad taste in her mouth. She felt restless, edgy, tense, even feverish. She felt... expectant. As if she were standing in the doorway of a darkened room, waiting for permission to enter.

She learned to let Dean go all over again, reluctantly, and he her; but Sammy was never out of her sight.

* * *

Christmas was a rather paltry affair by Winchester standards, only a small tree, no other decorations, and worst of all to Mary, no open fire. But Dean at least was delighted to get even some of his toys 'back', scattering ripped paper across the whole apartment, never once standing still till each of his packages had been thoroughly mauled.

He still had nightmares, still woke shaking and sweating with fear, calling for Mary, was still reluctant sometimes to go anywhere without her; but compared to a month ago, he was almost back to normal.

Sammy slept most of the morning next to his new teddy bear while John cooked breakfast and Dean and Mary sipped huge mugs of hot chocolate and coffee respectively, flipping through the TV channels and giggling together. Then they all watched movies and trekked downstairs to play in the snow for a few hours in the afternoon.

Strange, not having their own garden anymore, having to walk two flights of stairs just to get outside, not having two floors or two bathrooms or a roomy, sunlit kitchen.

Dean fell asleep on his Dad's shoulder as John carried him back inside, worn out with snowmen and jumping in drifts, and later that night, Mary slowly and carefully unwound the bandages from around her waist, revealing that perfectly straight gash across her stomach, scar tissue pink and new and vivid in the dim light.

John wrapped his hands around her hips, heavy and rough, fingertips pressing into her flesh (and she's become so thin, so terribly thin, all the rounded curves he loved just melted away), wet mouth stinging a little on raw new skin. They made love tender and careful despite the urgency burning in Mary's blood, gleaming in John's eyes, caresses more gentle, movements slower, aching and languorous. Kisses just as fierce. Afterwards, lying wrapped in his arms, boneless and sated, his heartbeat under her cheek, she felt as if her whole world had been off-kilter for weeks, and had just now slid, quietly and unobtrusively, back into place. Back where it belonged.

* * *

Missouri Mosely was not the sort of woman to beat around the bush. Any bush.

"I can help you with that problem of yours," she announced when Mary opened the apartment door to her in early January.

"You mean our current lack of hot water, or the fact that I've just realised I forgot to clean the coffee machine?" Mary quipped.

"Girl," Missouri said, eyes narrowing angrily, "that mouth of yours is gonna get you into some bad trouble one day if you ain't careful."

Mary grinned. "I know. It got me John."

Missouri guffawed. "Didn't it just. You gonna let me in yet?"

"Depends. You gonna tell me your name?"

"Missouri Mosely. I'm a psychic."

"So you should also be able to tell me what problem it is you think I have just by looking at me, right?"

This time, there was no mistaking the calm hostility in Mary's voice. Missouri caught herself short of a smile; perhaps they'd make it after all, this family. Perhaps they were strong enough.

"Honey," she said, voice soft and gentle, "the night your house burned down... there was something there, wasn't there? A presence. Something that tried to hurt your family."

Mary stepped back and gestured for her to come inside, silent and pale.

* * *

John was home within twenty minutes of Mary's quiet phone call. Sammy was peacefully asleep – he did that much more than Dean ever had, just lay there and floated off into dreamland, perfectly content. Missouri stood over him for a few long moments as John came in, took his coat off.

"Is everything OK? What's happened?"

"Everything's fine. Missouri, she – she knows about – the night of the fire."

"Knows," John repeated flatly, turning to her.

"Knows, Jonathan Edward Winchester. You _have_ heard of psychics, right? I can tell you what you need to do to protect your family. And maybe all the world."

Mary's hand was on John's arm, fingers digging tight into the skin just above his elbow. "Win," she said, and he looked over at her, eyes meeting, silent conversation that not even Missouri, with all her gifts, could follow.

"OK," he said quietly, and sat down.

"Better be quick," Mary said. "Dean finishes preschool in two hours."

Missouri took her at her word. "You saw somethin'," she said without preamble. "In the house, that night. You saw somethin' that shouldn't have been possible – somethin' that shouldn't have been there."

Mary might as well have been sitting on John's lap, they were so close, and her hands twisted into his when she spoke. "There was a man with yellow eyes in Sammy's nursery," she said. "I saw him from behind – thought it was John. Then I realised he was still downstairs, and... he flung me across the room, Missouri. I ran to Sammy's crib, and he flung me across the room and lifted me against the wall. He tore me open without ever even touching me. The only thing I remember after that is John catching me; then..."

Missouri fought down an urge to reach across the rather rickety coffee table and take the girl's hands in hers, lend her some kind of comfort. At the same time, she couldn't help but admire how steady Mary's voice was, how calm and rational.

Oh yes. These two could handle it.

"Well, it's like this," she said. "I can pick up on people's emotions, their feelin's. Can tell what they're thinking of if we're close enough, if their emotions are strong enough. Now, I've been by your house since the fire – reckon most everybody in town's driven by to gawp at it – and when I did, I had a sense... a sense of evil. Pure evil. Tell the truth, it scared me a little."

It was John who spoke first. "Evil as in... look. This might sound crazy, but I don't think that there was a man in Sammy's nursery – no," catching hold of Mary's wrist as she pulled back from him, hurt and disbelieving, " – no, love, I believe you. But I don't think what you saw – I don't think what you saw was human."

Missouri was never sure if the look he gave her then was a plea for backup or for denial; but the man was smarter then she'd given him credit for. It made her feel a bit guilty, that she'd assumed he'd be the difficult one, the... well, not to put too fine a point on it, the dumb one.

"John's right, Mary," she said quietly. "There was no _he_ in Sammy's nursery. There was an _it_. My guess is, a demon. Just a guess, mind you; I'm not qualified for anythin' else. But not many things have power like that."

"A demon," Mary whispered.

Missouri sat in silence, watched her absorb it, turn the idea over in her mind.

"What else is real?" John asked at last. Missouri met his eyes unflinching. "I wish I didn't have to tell you this," she said. "But... everything."

* * *

The day after their talk with Missouri went by in a blur for John. He worked solely on autopilot, using only about a quarter of his brain to talk to people. The other three were occupied with replaying yesterday's conversation, turning it over and over in his mind.

By the time he headed home, his decision had been made.

_I can put you in touch with people who can help you more. _

_Help us more how?_

_That depends on what you want to do with this knowledge._

_I want to get some kind of control back over my life. I want to be able to protect my family. I want to know that the thing that attacked my wife and son isn't going to come back for them, or Dean; and that if it does, I can fight it._

Mary felt the same. He didn't need to ask her about that; it was a given. She'd never been one to lie back and let things happen to her, and she certainly wouldn't start that now the boys were so obviously in danger.

He found the kitchen table piled with books when he got into the apartment. Dean had his nose buried in _Winnie-the-Pooh_, Tigger firmly clamped under one arm, eyes narrowed and forehead wrinkled in concentration, biting on his bottom lip in a gesture he'd inherited from his mother.

Mary's reading material wasn't nearly so innocent. She sat opposite Dean, Sammy nestled in the crook of her arm, feeding him. Long fingers wrapped around the bottle, hair tied up in a messy bun at the back of her neck, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. John tucked his hands into the pockets of his trousers and watched them in silence for a few minutes. If he hadn't been able to see quite clearly that his wife was reading up on the origins and powers of succubi, it would have made a perfect family picture.

"You know, Win," Mary said without looking up, "I'm starting to think it was a very good thing Uncle Nick made Vicky and I learn to shoot properly when we came over here."

"To say the least," John said. "Where would I be now if you hadn't been there to kick the crap outta me on that firing range?"

She looked up at him then, smiling a little. "Oh, we woulda met. I'da brought my car in sometime, or you would've ended up in the ER with a broken arm, or we would've crashed our trolleys together in the supermarket one morning tryin' to get at the last bag of coffee beans –"

"Dad," Dean said a few moments later. "Dad... Mom, that's gross. _Gross._ Right, Sammy? Daaad! Come and see how far I've read today."

* * *

"The nightmares started right after my parents died," Mary said out of the blue that same night. They were in bed, covers pulled up around their shoulders against the chill. John barely dared to move, wrapped round her as he was – Mary would happily talk about her childhood in England, or about growing up here in the States, but the time in between, her parent's deaths and the weeks after, was way off limits.

Not that he blamed her. She'd been thirteen, a sheltered, loved, treasured little girl dumped into the real world in the worst possible way without anyone to help her, coping with her own grief while looking after her little sister. Then her uncle Nick had brought them back to Kansas with him, unwilling to stay in the country his sister had died in, adding the chore of finding her feet in a strange place to the burden of grief and responsibility for Vicky.

John would have thought it was the worst thing the man could have done, if it weren't for the fact that he would never have met her otherwise.

Mary shifted against him a bit, took his silence for the encouragement it was. "They weren't anything... anything special, they didn't involve, you know, ceilings and fires that came out of nowhere or anything. They were just... I kept seeing the crash. Over and over, the car sliding out of control and crashing into the ditch. Of course I hadn't seen it for real, I'd just... I'd try to climb down, to help, and I'd hear them... hear Mum calling me, and there was all this blood, and there was nothing I could do. Couldn't reach them, couldn't open the doors... The worst ones, Vicky would be in the car too, screaming for me, and I simply couldn't..."

It wasn't really possible for John to draw her any closer than she was, but he tried just the same. She carried on, quiet and broken. "There was always this man there. He stood by the road, you know, where the car had skidded off... he stood up there, and watched me try and climb, this man-shaped shadow that never moved... this man-shaped shadow with yellow eyes. Once or twice, I thought I saw him in real life, too... just standing there, watching me. Watching Vicky. Eventually, the dreams stopped, but God, I was always so terrified, John. So afraid that he was real, that he'd come for Vicky and me the way he'd come for Mum and Dad."

Long shuddering breath, bitter amusement in it. "And now he's come for Sam. Maybe even Dean, too. We'd never have known a thing about it if I hadn't run into the nursery, would we?"

"Hey. We'll beat this. We'll find a way. Sam's our son. This man... this _thing_ isn't getting him. Not now, not ever. All right?"

"What do you think we should do?"

"Whatever we have to. Move, for a start. Get out of Lawrence."

"Where to?" She still had her back to him; he was talking into her hair. It was easier like that.

"I've been thinking, and... the farm in Indiana is still mine. Sale hasn't gone through yet; I can call it off."

"The farm." She was silent for a while, thinking of John's parent's farm, the big old house tucked away in the woods, the acres of land. Of leaving Lawrence, abandoning their friends, selling John's share in the garage, quitting her job. Mary was already sure that she couldn't bear to live in their beloved house again; she'd never be free of the memories it now held even without going back there.

"It's a good place to bring up boys," her husband teased softly.

"Dean would love it," Mary agreed. "We could get him that dog."

Silence again, both of them picturing bringing their sons up in Indiana, in the house John himself had grown up in.

"Whatever we have to," Mary said at last, and finally turned to kiss him.

* * *

Minnesota in February was _freezing_. Mary hugged Sam close inside her heavy leather jacket as they crunched through the snow to the small church. Dean was stomping along in his new boots, looking grown-up and important, but not far enough from John's hand that he couldn't grab hold if he felt the need.

They'd read the books and spoken to Missouri and made all the preparations for the move, but so far, it had all been talk. Now, though... with this trip, in this place, it all began.

Mary wasn't sure what_ it_ was, exactly, but right now, the future seemed to stretch before her, a long dark road that wound through the woods, ominous and inescapable. Her restlessness was completely gone. From the moment Missouri had told her what was really out there in the dark, this path had become inevitable.

In a strange way, it felt like coming home; like remembering a decision long-since made and long-since forgotten. Like accepting a purpose that had been there always, waiting for her just out of sight until she was ready to take it up.

She hadn't mentioned any of this to John; it felt oddly private, something very personal, and that was ridiculous in and of itself, because half the time she couldn't tell anymore where she left off and he began, but there it was. The sense that somewhere in the upper regions of Creation, some Higher Being or other had snapped its fingers at Mary's decision and said to itself, "Done! And done! Excellent! Perfect! Just as I'd always planned it!"

That last thought in particular really pissed her off.

They came into the church towards the end of the service, took seats in the very back. Dean glared round balefully, his displeasure at not being allowed to play in the snow outside enunciated in his every movement – till Mary put Sammy on his lap. Nothing snapped Dean out of a bad mood faster than being asked to look after his little brother.

None of the Winchesters were particularly riveted by the service. Mary had given up on God long years ago, around the time her parents had died, although she'd taught Dean the same prayers her Mum and Dad had taught her and Vicky as children. John never bothered with any of it. He'd lost his faith in Vietnam. But Mary's glare kept him and Dean pinned in their seats and relatively still, while Sammy wriggled a bit, face scrunched-up and pissy.

He was gonna be a handful.

They stayed put as the service ended and the congregation began to file out, most of them staring unashamedly at the strangers, curious or surprised or cheerful or welcoming. Mary met their looks with a steady gaze that never failed to make people bugger off, awkward and embarrassed. John was watching the Pastor make his way towards them, studying the man intently.

If Mary leaned over now and put her hand on his leg, it would probably vibrate under her fingers, humming with tension and excitement like a live wire as Murphy drew level with them. She stood up, hand outstretched to shake.

"Pastor Murphy? I'm Mary Winchester."

Dark hair, nice smile, bright blue eyes that studied her carefully, took in everything about them all, watchful and wary.

"Well," he said. "You're not quite what I was expecting."

Mary's eyebrows rose.

"The children," he explained.

"They're kinda why we're here," John said as they shook hands, gripping hard, measuring each other up.

Murphy nodded at his words. "I see. Well, you'd better come back to the house with me... it's not far. And call me Jim, please."


	2. Chapter 2

Victoria Anne Carmichael had never thought of herself as particularly selfish; but she had to admit to a few twinges of guilt as she made her way from Cambridge to Indiana. As the journey lasted a good few hours, she had plenty of time to analyse them.

And, more importantly, prepare her defence for when she actually reached her sister's house.

After all, Mary had told her to stay at university – had said there was nothing she could do to help even if she were in the States. Had even made her promise to do well in her finals, get her degree. Still Vicky had occasionally felt that she was doing something wrong by staying in England... that she should have ignored her sister's protests and come straight back to Kansas after the fire.

That was six years ago now, and while she and Mary wrote to each other, and spoke on the phone, Vicky hadn't been back to America. But Uncle Nick's death was the perfect reason – or excuse? – to go, see her sister, sort everything out that needed sorting out, and finally put to rest the nagging sense that she should be doing something completely different with her life.

It had been pure luck that she'd caught the flight she had, so Mary had no idea that she was already in the States. Vicky debated calling her, but it was late morning when the plane landed, and with any luck she could reach the house by late afternoon, so she just rented a car, bought a map, and started to drive.

The farm was located somewhere in the woods between Bloomington and Evansville, outside a town with the (to Vicky) pretty ridiculous name of Huntingburg. Vicky's penchant for getting lost in the car was something of a family legend, so she took the safest route and stuck to the Interstate – first I-65 down to Louisville, and then I-64 to Evansville. It might take an hour or so longer, but there was no way she'd get lost.

But the closer Vicky got to her sister, the more the nervousness squirming in her stomach grew; would Mary blame her? Be angry? She couldn't stand that. True, they'd been perfectly civil and friendly over the phone for six years, but face-to-face, that could soon change.

What about John? What would he think of her? And she doubted Dean would even recognise her anymore. She hadn't seen Sammy since he'd been, oh, about three weeks old.

Vicky drew a breath, punched the steering wheel. "Honestly," she said out loud. "She's your _sister_. You're here because Uncle Nick's _died_. And anyway, Mary never starts an argument. She just finishes them – often quite crushingly. So if you do fight, it would be all your own fault anyway."

She rolled the window down and lit herself a cigarette, feeling a bit stupid, but not about to stop the car. She suspected she'd turn it around and fly straight home if she did that. Vicky had never liked America much; she'd been ten when her parents had died and she'd been dragged out here, and she'd spent most of the following nine years dreaming desperately about going home again. England was a link to Mum and Dad, a way to be close to them still, the repository of all her childhood memories.

Sometimes she thought she missed it because she needed a sense of permanence, of stability, in ways Mary never had. America was... not transient exactly, but in comparison to England, it was fragile as glass. Vicky took great comfort in the history and permanence of Cambridge; buildings and traditions that had stood for nearly a thousand years. She could put down roots at home that weren't about to be blown away by the next tornado.

Mary on the other hand loved it here: the long open roads, the miles of emptiness, the freedom of it. If Mum and Dad dying had made Vicky a bit agoraphobic, then it had made Mary equally claustrophobic.

All things considered, if those were the only quirks the two of them had, they were pretty damn lucky.

It was past six when Vicky turned the car into the long drive that led up to John's parent's house (she still had trouble thinking of it as her sister's), maybe two hundred yards off the main road.

Gold-green fields stretched into the distance all around her, hiding the road. A brook appeared suddenly out of the tall grass of the verge and ran alongside the lane for a short way before the lane curved to the right, away from a deep, green pond, past a small copse on her left and into the open space before the front porch.

The house itself was big; not tall but long and rambling, the woods starting up not far behind it. Vicky could tell the place wasn't being used as a farm; the barn and other few outbuildings weren't falling down yet, but they obviously weren't being regularly used, either.

Vicky would've gone mad if she had to live here for any length of time, but she could see at once why Mary loved it. Big, old (as old as anything in the States ever was), open spaces, a pond with a rowing-boat pulled up on the bank, a stream, the woods behind it. A huge oak tree at the opposite end of the house; she could see a rope ladder dangling from it, and supposed the boys must have a tree-house up there.

She parked the car next to that huge gas-guzzling monstrosity that John had helped Mary pick out on their second date and climbed out. A pile of buckets and rags by the Impala suggested it had been washed not long ago; the hard-packed dirt ground was still wet, too. Vicky picked her way across it to the safety of the gravel in front of the house, hating the thought of getting mud on this pair of shoes in particular.

Then she stopped, and just looked around, soaking it all in. The place was practically a cliché, really; but that, perhaps, was its especial charm.

Just as she turned to take in the admittedly spectacular view across the pond and fields, a small dark-haired bundle of humanity seemed to appear out of nowhere at her side to run straight into her with a loud _oomph_.

Vicky staggered; the little boy practically bounced off her, landing on his backside in the dust. A large black dog appeared behind him in the same silent way as the boy himself, and growled at her threateningly.

Huge dark eyes, messy hair, grubby and tanned, mouth open in an 'o' of surprise.

"You're not a monster, are you?" he asked earnestly. "Down, Anubis!"

Sam. It could only be Sam. Dean was too old, and blond besides. The dog stopped growling, but Vicky swore it was glaring at her.

Vicky smiled. "No, darn. I'm not a monster."

"But if you were, you'd say that anyway," her nephew reasoned. He had Mary's nose. "You should prob'ly go. Mommy and Daddy kill monsters, and Dean would too, only he's not big 'nuff. That's _awful_, cause he's my big brother, and if he's not big 'nuff yet, then how big will _I _have to be before_ I_ get to do it?"

"Should you really be warning me about your Mummy and Daddy, if I were a monster?" Vicky asked mischievously.

Sammy cocked his head off to one side. "You might be a nice monster," he said dubiously.

"Then your Mummy wouldn't kill me, would she?"

She watched him think about that, turning it over in his mind. "I... guess... not," he said slowly. "I'll ask Dean. He knows everything."

"Tell you a secret?"

"A nice one?"

"I always thought so."

"OK."

"You know how you have Dean for a big brother? Your Mummy is my big sister."

He stared up at her, wide-eyed. "Really?"

Vicky felt a twinge of hurt that he didn't know who she was; but all things considered, she probably deserved it.

"Really. D'you know where she is right now?"

Mary herself was the one who answered, voice drifting across the yard from the side of the house.

"Sammy! Sammy, where the hell are you?"

"Mom! Mom, quick!"

Vicky turned to watch the direction Sam was yelling in. Mary rounded the corner of the house and passed the oak tree at a quick jog that died a sudden death when she saw Vicky, jaw dropping in that astonished way she'd always had, eyes very green.

The two sisters stood and stared at each other for what felt like forever before Mary's astonishment gave way to utter delight.

"Vicky!"

"I'm so sorry," Vicky said, clinging to her. "I should've come sooner..."

"Oh, crap," Mary said. "We've been fine, darn. I'm so glad to see you! Or I would be, if..."

"Yeah," Vicky agreed. "Well, we'll manage, you and me."

Mary reached out to cup her sister's face, study the changes. Vicky knew what she saw: shorter hair, blond as ever but without waves now, Dad's dark blue eyes. She was taller and more filled out than when Mary had last seen her, much more grown-up. Her expensive pantsuit was hopelessly rumpled by now, but that didn't matter.

Vicky for her part thought her sister had changed enormously. Movements quicker, more coordinated, her whole attitude harder, more openly self-confident. Her hair was a messy knot at the back of her head, and Vicky was sure she was, not _thinner_ exactly, because to Vicky the word implied a slightly unhealthy look. No, Mary was... leaner. An athlete's thinness, all strength and endurance. Tanned, too, lines around her mouth and eyes put there by laughter and accentuated by the outdoors.

Then little hands curled into Mary's loose shirt and tugged; both women looked down at Sammy.

"She's really not a monster?"

Mary laughed out loud, bent to snatch him up, balance him on one hip. "No, love. This is your Aunt Vicky. For god's sake, don't hug him, Vick. He's filthy. How you managed that, I have no idea –"

"I was escaping the fortress," Sam said earnestly. "I gotta 'port back to base before dinner, or we lose the battle. Dad said so."

"Oh, well. You'd better report back quick before you wash up. Dinner's nearly ready, and Dean's laying the table."

Sam wriggled out of her arms and scooted off without another word. Mary glared at the dog. "And you," she told it; it slunk past them with a last suspicious look for Vicky and took off after Sam.

Vicky hooked an arm through Mary's and let her sister lead her round the back of the house, smiling. "John cooking?"

"It's his week for it," Mary agreed. "Won't be long before Dean can have one too. He's pretty good."

"For a ten-year-old," Vicky said, surprised. Mary smiled rather thinly.

"Dean grew up pretty fast when... after the fire. Too fast, maybe; I don't know. But there's some things you just can't protect your kids from, no matter how you try."

Vicky didn't know what to say to that.

They made their way past the oak tree – there was a swing hanging from a sturdy branch on the other side to the ladder – and into the garden. It was as messy and random as the front yard, a riot of greenery and a lawn that needed mowing, a fence painted a variety of colours between it and the trees beyond, symbols and squiggles scrawled across the aging wood in blue and green and beige and red.

Mary caught her looking at the rainbow fence and laughed. "The boys went all out with the leftover paint from the house one day."

Vicky just frowned. Some of the symbols seemed more than random; more than scribbling. One or two she thought she recognised from an anthropology class she'd taken years ago, but she wasn't sure.

There was no real back porch, just a large patio under a sloping roof, tufts of grass and weeds poking up between the slabs. A long, solid wooden table was sitting on it, weather-beaten and scratched, four places laid. Mary ran a hand over one corner.

"Been here for as long as John can remember," she told her sister. "They all used to eat at it when he was a kid, family, farm hands, everyone. Anyway. That door leads into the corridor. Kitchen's to the right, dining room on the left. Bathroom behind it, just a small one, and the living room behind the kitchen, and then a study on the left side of the house at the very front. Upstairs there's four bedrooms and another bathroom, but you can sleep in the hayloft if you like."

Eyes shining with amusement. Vicky thumped her, laughing; as a child she'd always wanted to sleep in a hayloft like the Famous Five. She'd been terribly disappointed when Uncle Nick had informed her that no, his house didn't have one.

The boy's and John's voices floated through the open windows, a squabble about the bathroom by the sound of it, and then John was in the open doorway, grinning at Vicky.

"Hey you. When Sam said you'd turned up in the front yard I didn't believe him. How long did it take you to find this place?"

"Hey, I was really good," Vicky protested as they hugged. "I stuck to the Interstate all the way, no short cuts or anything."

"Safest way to go," John said, still amused. "You eaten yet? There's spaghetti."

"You might want to miss this," Mary said. "Spaghetti may look harmless, but in Dean and Sammy's hands it can quickly become a deadly weapon."

"Oh, I'll survive. Got my big sister to look after me. Besides, I'm starving."

"All right then," John said easily.

"And a bottle of red," Mary added as he turned away.

"Would her Majesty like anything else while I'm in the kitchen?" John asked mockingly.

"It can wait," Mary smirked with a knowing tilt of her eyebrows; he laughed out loud and went back into the house.

Vicky groaned. "I forgot you do that."

"Do what?" Mary asked innocently.

"Flirt with each other all the damn time," Vicky retorted. "It's positively indecent now you're married to one another."

"You read too much Oscar Wilde."

"Impossible, my dear," Vicky said, utterly delighted at the way Mary's Midwestern drawl had fallen away as if it had never existed, the Queen's English she'd had during their childhood still perfect as ever.

Then the boys appeared from the house. Sammy was carrying Vicky's plate, glass and cutlery with a look of intense concentration, balancing it all carefully across the uneven flagstones.

"Sit next to me, Aunt Vicky," he said, half-question, half-order.

"I'd love to, Sam," Vicky said promptly, and watched him beam. "Thank you very much."

"What about me?" Mary pouted.

"I found her first," Sammy said, little forehead wrinkling in an already magnificent scowl.

"Dumbass," Dean said. "How can you have found her first when she's Mom's sister?"

"I can too!" Sam protested.

"Boys..." their mother said.

Dean rolled his eyes extravagantly and grinned at Vicky. Sam was absolutely adorable, but Dean was gorgeous. Once he grew into those looks, filled out some...

He'd be lethal.

"You remember me?" she asked him with a grin.

"Sure," he said easily. "You took me to the zoo, right?"

"Tigers," Vicky nodded. "The day Sam was born." Dean's grin grew a little wider. She wanted to hug him, but something about the way he held himself, the way he looked at her, told her the gesture wouldn't be appreciated.

"Dean, out the way, son," John said, coming out of the house with the huge bowl of spaghetti and the wine bottle. Mary was a step behind him, carrying the sauce; Vicky hadn't even noticed her sister leave her side, she'd been so quiet.

That sent a shiver down her spine for some reason.

Dinner was spent talking and teasing and catching up; Vicky told the boys about England; Mary quizzed her about university, her doctorate, her new apartment, told her about renovating the farmhouse, about moving up here, about getting the dog. They avoided talking about Uncle Nick for the time being by silent, mutual consent.

The one thing neither Mary nor John would really talk about was _why_ they'd moved here, and what they were actually doing these days. It wasn't nothing, that much was clear; they still had money. But some sixth sense was telling Vicky that Mary was no more working as a nurse than John owned another garage.

So what the hell was going on? The last time Vicky had seen her sister this evasive was... well, never. They didn't have secrets, the two of them.

Or rather, they hadn't _had _secrets.

John... Vicky had never really known her brother-in-law well enough to be able to get anything out of him now. At seventeen, she'd had a huge crush on the older mechanic, and after she'd found out he was dating her older sister, had nobly resolved (with all the melodramatic self-sacrifice of a teenager) not to see him again.

Even though he had barely spoken half-a-dozen words to her at the time.

Vicky remembered that silly bout of teenage self-pity with a suppressed grin these days, and a touch of regret that she'd never made the time to get to know him properly before she left for university in England. Still, sitting there in the fading light, cataloguing the changes six years had wrought in her family, she caught herself comparing John's dark, rugged good looks to Peter's blond aesthetic perfection, and feeling a bit like she was cheating on him.

Mary chose that moment to turn those older-sister mind-reading powers of hers back on with a blast, and leaned over the table to catch Vicky's left hand.

"You're joking," she said, twisting the diamond ring to catch the light.

"No, I'm not," Vicky retorted. "He's a good man."

"I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much. How dare you say yes to him before I've looked him over?"

"Oh, I don't know, um, you weren't there?"

"What kind of an excuse is that? What's his name?"

"Peter Fraser. Doctorate in physics. We met in Heffers, of all places."

"How stunningly romantic. Did you trip over a stack of books and fall into his arms?"

"Local gossip used to have it that you and John met in a junkyard. Fuelled no doubt by the undeniable fact that you went car-shopping for a second date."

"I wanted a good one!" Mary exclaimed, laughing.

"They met on a firing range," Dean said, caught between amusement and disgust. "Not a _junkyard_. For the record, I refuse to have resulted from a meeting in a _junkyard_."

"You know, there's a word they use for kids like you," his Dad said.

"Handsome and talented," Dean said promptly.

"Spoiled rotten. Clear the table, eh?"

"Dad! I laid it."

"Dean. The sooner it's empty, the sooner you get dessert."

Dean sighed. "Yessir."

"I'll help!" Sammy piped up, sliding off his cushion-piled chair and reaching up to grasp his plate. The top of his head was barely level with it. Mary leaned over and firmly drew it away from him.

"No, you won't. You're not tall enough yet, Sammy."

Vicky had to clap a hand over her mouth to hold in her giggles at the sight of Sammy's once-more grubby hands waving mournfully over the edge of the table-top for a minute before he gathered up his cushions and started to climb back onto his chair.

"Be taller than any of you one day," he grumbled.

* * *

So this was why she never came back to the States. Vicky remembered now: jet lag.

Jet. Lag.

It was past one in the morning, and she was still wide awake.

Super.

Eventually, after much tossing and turning, she got out of bed, tiptoed across her darkened room, stubbed her toe on the corner of her suitcase, nearly walked into the wardrobe, and finally reached the hall in triumph.

She groped for the light switch for a minute before her eyes adjusted, and she could see the faint glow coming up the stairs. Mary? John? At any rate, she'd have company. Vicky didn't relish the idea of puttering about in that big kitchen for an hour before she found the teabags.

It was John _and_ Mary, she realised in the hallway, John's deep drawl and Mary's lighter, clearer tones separating from the murmur as she drew closer.

"... sure it was a heart attack?" John.

"Positive. Nothing dodgy about it in the least, Caleb says."

Caleb who? Were they talking about _Nick?_

"What do you wanna do?"

Mary sighed. "Go down to Kansas and bury my uncle?"

"Mary. Please, love. Now Vicky's here... there's no time to take the boys to Jim's, and it's not safe down there, you know that. Why did we leave in the first place?"

"John, my baby sister's getting _married_, and I can't be there. Nick's dead, and I wasn't there... I know it's risking a lot. More than anybody, I know! But I wanna stay a while in Lawrence. I want to bury my uncle. I want to say a proper goodbye to the man who took us in after Mum and Dad died. I want to sort his things out myself, not have some stranger come in and –"

Vicky heard one of them move – probably John, shift of clothing on skin and creak of wood resettling. She could picture them in one of those big old chairs together, Mary curled up on his lap, her head under his chin, the same way they used to sit in the porch swing at Nick's house.

"What do we do?" Mary asked quietly after a few minutes. "I can't tell her. I can't."

"Then don't. Then we'll drive to Kansas, bury Nick, sort out his things. Come back home, say goodbye to Vicky, and politely refuse the wedding invitation when it comes."

"She's my _sister_," Mary hissed.

"And you're hers," John snapped. "I don't remember her rushing to your bedside after the fire, while you were in the hospital with your stomach ripped open, close to dying those first few days."

Vicky felt like she'd been slapped, but John wasn't finished.

"I can't believe she'll sit still long enough for us to tell her even half of this. And if you're honest with yourself, neither can you, love."

Mary didn't answer. Vicky wanted to cry.

Should have known he wasn't as forgiving as Mary. Family came before everything with John; as far as he was concerned, Vicky had abandoned hers six years ago.

Maybe she had. Maybe she really had.

* * *

Mary woke up early the next morning to a series of horrifically loud thuds and Sammy's high-pitched laughter. Beside her, John groaned.

"Sounds like someone's suitcase going down the stairs."

Mary curled into the covers and squeezed her eyes shut with a sob. The mattress dipped as John rolled out of bed and crossed the room.

"Keep it down, you two!" he called into the hallway, got a chorus of "Yessir!" in return and then closed the door again. Mary couldn't help a grin when she heard the key click in the lock, but resolutely didn't roll over, or open her eyes, until John leaned over her, dog tags brushing cold across her back, gathered a handful of her thin nightdress and inched it slowly up and off, trailing kisses down the side of her neck and across her shoulder, thigh pushing heavy and warm between her own.

* * *

It was nearly half-past eleven by the time they were all ready to leave for Kansas. The boys were trying to be subdued and quiet for Mary and Vicky's sake, but they weren't succeeding. It had been a while since they'd gone anywhere, and Dean was looking positively delighted as he coaxed the dog into the back of the Impala. But the memory of those kids in Wisconsin that had fallen victim to the Shtriga had made Mary more nervous than usual about letting them out of her sight lately, even if she and John had killed the damn thing.

Vicky had changed into jeans and trainers today, looked tired but more comfortable than yesterday. She smiled wanly at Mary as they stood in the drive.

"Would have made more sense to meet you in Lawrence," she said.

Mary leaned over and kissed her cheek. "I'm glad you didn't. It was nice to have an evening to ourselves, away from – it."

"Yeah." Vicky agreed. "I've booked a flight back from Kansas City next Monday, so you won't have to put up with me for long."

"Ye gods," Mary said. "I've put up with you for thirty-odd years, I can manage. Now get your ass in the car. I'm just saying bye to the boys."

"What? No, you should drive with them," Vicky protested weakly as Mary pointed imperiously at the passenger door of the rental.

"Honey, I've been doing that for more trips than I care to count. Get in there. Quite apart from your atrocious navigating skills, you need some sleep before you drive off the road."

Vicky didn't have it in her to protest any further. She watched through the windscreen as Mary issued last minute orders, hugged Sammy through the window of the Impala, and then reached up and kissed John. He'd been laughing at the little 'goodbye', eyes crinkled up and bright with amusement. When Mary drew back from him, she rubbed a thumb along his jaw, through the stubble there, and said something that made him kiss her again, brief but fierce, before giving her a little shove towards the rental. Mary's fingertips trailed across his stomach as she moved past him, lingering contact that made Vicky think of the first few months of their relationship, when they were constantly all over each other.

Mary noticed her scrutiny. "Well?" she said as they followed the Impala out of the yard and onto the lane.

"He doesn't think the boys should go, does he?" It was the closest she could come to admitting she'd overheard them in the kitchen last night. John had been nothing but friendly all morning, but Vicky was coming to understand that he drew a very sharp line between friendship and trust.

Mary sighed. "Neither do I, really."

"Surely they could stay with friends?"

"Too far," Mary said briefly. "Besides, I want them where I can keep an eye on them. Even John agrees that makes sense. Albeit reluctantly, the insufferable jerk."

Vicky chuckled.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing. It's just..."

"Hmmm?"

"It's adorable, that's all."

"You've lost me."

"Your relationship with your husband."

"Insofar as?"

"You're all over each other. All the time. And then, you know, the name-calling. It's adorable."

"It's the near-death-experience thing."

"Six years ago."

"Um," Mary said, and there was that evasive look again, with an undercurrent of amusement now that didn't bode well. Vicky sighed.

"Never mind. I guess I envy you a bit. You have this way of – not flaunting it, it's just – it's just _there_. Like the Rocky Mountains, eternal and unchangeable."

Mary laughed herself silly over that. Vicky wrapped the blanket her sister had brought from the house around herself and pretended to go to sleep, resolutely ignoring her sister's giggles.

Eventually, she dropped off for real.

* * *

The eight-hour drive to Lawrence took nine with rest stops included, and Mary drove the whole way. Vicky was too tired and grateful to be surprised at her sister's new-found stamina. They stopped for a quick meal in St. Louis and then drove straight through to Lawrence. The boys and Vicky were all wiped by the time they pulled into the motel parking lot.

"How'd you wanna do this?" Mary asked her husband quietly. "We won't all fit in one room."

Sam was fast asleep across Dean's lap in the back of the Impala; Vicky, too, was out for the count. Anubis was running around the lot, glad of the chance to stretch his legs. John sighed, rubbed a hand over his mouth.

"I know what you're thinking, and I don't like the idea of you alone with Vicky. If anything happens..."

"The _boys_ are the point here. They'll be safe with you."

"Mary, we're in _Lawrence_ for God's sake. This all started right here, not five miles away. Call me paranoid, but better safe than sorry, and I couldn't bear to lose you."

She reached out to him with a sudden laugh, palms flat against his chest, clenching her fingers in his shirt a little, forehead resting over his breastbone. John wrapped his arms around her waist.

"Paranoid," Mary said in a hoarse, broken voice. "Paranoid. Oh, God, John, listen to us. _Paranoid_. My uncle dies, and the first thing we do is check to see if it – and being afraid to bring the boys back here after _six years_ -"

Little hand at the small of her back. "Mom? Are you OK?"

Dean.

"Hey, Dean," John said softly. "You take care of your Mom for a minute? I'll get us those rooms."

Dean caught Mary's wrist and made her sit down on the still-warm hood of the Impala. She sniffled, wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. Not until she'd actually reached Lawrence had it truly sunk in on her that Nick was dead; that he really wasn't here anymore.

"Sorry, love. I just don't – I mean –"

"It's like if Pastor Jim died," Dean said quietly. "For you, I mean."

"Oh." Mary cupped his face in her hands. "When did you grow up so much, and how did I miss it?"

"You were saving Sammy from a monster," Dean said calmly. "It's OK, Mom. I'm OK. We're all OK, you know? I don't like being back here either. But the bad thing's gone, right? We're not here for long, Dad says so. And so what if Aunt Vicky wouldn't understand about the monsters, and – and the fire? You've got Sammy and me. And Dad."

"You're precocious," Mary told him. "And wise, and loving, and far older than your years, and I won't ever be able to put into words just how much I love you, Dean Winchester." She kissed his cheek and hugged him close. He pressed his face into her shoulder and clung to her far more tightly than he needed to; and Mary brushed a hand through his hair comfortingly.

"Hey. You know your Dad and I would never let anything bad happen to you, right?"

"S'not me," he said in a muffled voice.

"I'm not going away," Mary said quietly. "I'm never leaving you, Dean. Not ever. All the monsters in the world couldn't take me away from you."

He seemed about to say something, but then Anubis knocked over a trash can somewhere in the shadows with an almighty crash, and they both started to laugh.

* * *

"Room service in this place is terrible," Vicky said the next morning, poking at the salt line in front of the door with one toe.

"Don't disturb it," Mary said. "Keeps the mice out. You pick that up pretty quickly, living in a house as old as ours."

* * *

Nick Harrison's funeral was two days later. Mary and Vicky had spent much of the intervening time dealing with taxes and wills and death duties, and by the time they sat down in the church, neither of them could manage to feel anything but relief – both for themselves and for Nick, who could now, finally, be put to rest. Enough people had poked and prodded and examined his life over the last week. He deserved this funeral; deserved the peace it would bring, the ending it signified.

And all the while, it took every bit of self-control she had not to break down, to collapse under the pressing weight of grief for Nick and fear for the boys compounded by the memories of Mum and Dad's deaths and the terrible weight of responsibility she'd carried back then, until Nick had arrived and gently, firmly, taken it away from her and given her back a little bit of her shattered childhood.

Now he was gone himself, and Mary was still oldest, grown up now too, a mother even, and there _was no one else_.

Days like these she understood Peter Pan more than ever.

John sat on her right in the pew, holding her hand, fingers twined together. Dean was pressed against her left side, and Sammy balanced on her knee, eyes wide in his solemn little face, drinking it all in. Both his little hands were hanging on to her left one, wrapped around his waist.

Vicky sat on Dean's other side, feeling strangely left out.

The wake at the house went by in a blur of old faces and sympathetic smiles that all melted into one bland, homogenous person whenever Mary tried to look back on it. Had she really spent seven years living in this house? The rooms were familiar in the way that déjà vus and dreams are; not from a real memory. As it dragged on, it felt increasingly as though John's hand on her elbow was the only thing keeping her upright. Her feet, no longer accustomed to high heels, were aching and sore, and the damn dress was so tight in comparison to her normal clothes she could barely breathe in it, let alone walk.

Eventually, John collected the boys (who'd been out in the garden with the dog and a few other kids) dumped them in the Impala, and drew Mary herself out of the house before anyone else could try to start a conversation.

"What about Vicky?" Mary asked tiredly, slumped in the passenger seat.

"She can play hostess for a while. Don't they teach you English girls that art in your cradles?"

"I wish I weren't too tired to hit you."

"Can we –" Dean said as the Impala pulled into the motel parking lot, looking longingly at the playground. Sammy perked up at the suggestion, too. John sighed.

"An hour, no more. You got your watch, Dean?"

"Yessir. One hour, sir."

"Be careful," Mary murmured. John helped her out of the car, locked it, and then lifted her into his arms as easily as he had on their wedding day, if not more so. Mary wrapped her arms around his neck and let herself drift as he carried her into the room, laid her on his bed, drew off her shoes and dress. Short little petticoat, that stiff bra she hated but looked best with the scoop-neck dress. Then he got her into one of his old t-shirts, cracked a smile when she snuggled into the worn-out cotton, breathing him in.

"Come wash your feet in cold water," he started, but Mary slid off the bed into his lap instead and began, without saying anything or even looking at him, to cry – the first time she'd done so since learning of Nick's death last Friday.

* * *

Vicky was there for the great majority of the house-clearing, so by the time she left on Monday, with many tearful hugs and promises to visit that neither sister, if they were honest with themselves, truly expected would be kept, there was only the cluttered attic left. Nick's things, apart from some keepsakes Mary had chosen, would be sold off, as would the house, as per his will, and the money split four-way between his nieces and great-nephews. Dean had looked amazed when Mary told the boys about their new bank accounts.

"Really? Wow. That was awful nice."

"I was his favourite, so by proxy, so are you," Mary said, and grinned at him. "Just don't tell Vicky that."

Truth to tell, Vicky wouldn't have cared. She got on the plane at Kansas City with a sense of relief: a chore completed, a burden laid down. America lay far behind her before she'd even left the ground, Peter and Cambridge occupying all her thoughts. Really, she was fine. She'd grown up! She and Mary had both grown up and become two completely different people, which was only to be expected, and she was fine with that. Really, she was.

Nick's house was old and in need of a refurbish, so John and Mary let the boys off duty while they cleared the attic, not wanting to risk two adventurous boys in the rickety attic. Almost as soon as their parents disappeared from view up the stepladder, Dean and Sammy took off with a whoop and a yell, a crash or two, and what sounded like someone sliding down the big banister.

"Monsters," Mary said mock-disgustedly.

"Heathen savages," John agreed. "Why did we ever decide to have any?"

Mary giggled. "We didn't. Dean took the matter into his own hands."

"That's debatable. I like to put the blame on the car."

"Because it's an inanimate object and can't defend itself?"

John laughed. "Exactly. The perfect scapegoat."

"And you don't have to take the slightest bit of responsibility for any of it."

"Hey, I _am_ blameless. I didn't spend that evening with my hands up your skirt, you know."

Mary's grin widened into a smirk. "Mmm. Well, you're gorgeous in a tux. Although Sophie sulked for three days when both you and Deacon refused to wear dress blues for their wedding."

John decided it was probably safer to just let that one pass.

The attic was lit by two simple bulbs swinging from cables wound around the rafters, casting weird and wonderful shadows across the walls and sloped ceilings. It was hot and musty, every movement sending up clouds of dust. John and Mary stepped from beam to beam carefully, balancing precariously as they opened chests and dug through boxes. Old clothes, documents, a box of children's books and toys that had been Mary and Vicky's, a lot of photographs. Mary chose a few of her Mum as a girl, and some with her Dad, and then tossed the rest onto the rubbish pile.

Eventually, John dragged the last box out of the corner it was wedged in, between two rafters and half-hidden in the shadows. It was wooden, small but heavy, and the sliding rustle from inside as he moved it into the dim light made him think it was filled with documents.

It was also padlocked. Hm.

Picking it didn't take a minute; the lock was old, large and rusty. John dropped it onto the beam he was sitting on and flipped the lid. First thing to meet his eyes was a manila file, not very thick but at least fifteen years old. When he eased off the large paperclip holding it shut and flipped the cover back, his breath caught in his throat and his hands shook.

The police report on the car accident that had killed his parents-in-law. Christ, he couldn't let Mary see this, not now, so soon after Nick's death.

A glance at his wife showed she was looking through the last pile of yellowed photographs, sad little smile tugging at her mouth. She hadn't noticed him opening the box, thank God.

John hid the police report in the darkness where the box had lain and went back to the rest of the contents, jaw clenched. It took him less than a minute to realise that the whole box was about Patrick and Jane Carmichael's deaths: newspaper clippings, photos of a long stretch of road winding through the English countryside, the hedge on one side wrecked, deep tyre-marks in the grass leading into the ditch, the burned patch of ground where the car had caught fire.

At the very bottom, another file, much thicker this time, tied with string.

"Win? What's that?"

Mary climbed over a few beams to sit beside him, pressed against his side. John held the papers away before she could see.

"Don't, love – don't look. It's – it's about your parents."

"Mum and Dad – what?" She made a grab for the papers; he avoided her.

"Mary, please. It's police reports – photos – "

Mary let out a little noise, sob or gasp, John couldn't tell. "I think Nick was – was trying to find out why they died."

"In a car crash," she hissed.

"Your nightmares," he said. "The man with yellow eyes. Did you tell Nick about them?"

Her fingers dug into his lower arm, sharp pinpricks of pain that he would have endured a hundred thousand times over to spare her this.

"That last folder," she said.

"I haven't looked at it yet."

Mary lifted it out of the box, cut the string with her pocketknife. A mass of papers spilled out: pages of scribbled notes in Nick's handwriting, others that had been torn from books. Pictures of woodcuts and photographs of people neither of them recognised, what looked to be a biography of Samuel Colt, a small paperclipped bundle of pages torn from a Bible, a map of Wyoming. The Carmichael family tree, going back to the 1800s. A large, handwritten sheet of paper that was Nick's attempt to put together his and Jane's own family tree, going back as far as his brother-in-law's. Another map, of Massachusetts this time, a red circle drawn around the town of Amherst.

"What the Hell?" John whispered.

Mary stuffed the lot back into the folder viciously. "I don't know. Let's finish here and sort this out once we've left town. Toss that other stuff."

John knew better than to argue with her.

* * *

It was a six-hour drive to Jim's place in Blue Earth, and if it weren't for Dean, Anubis would have been unmanageable.

"I don't understand how that damn animal is perfectly happy to track a ghoul across half Arizona, but it can't sit in the back of the car for more than ten minutes without going stir-crazy," John snarled at one point.

"He's scared," Dean said. "Shut up and leave him alone."

"Wasn't this bad on the drive from Indiana," John snapped.

"That's cause you and Mom weren't sulking and pissed off at everybody," Dean retorted.

"Language, Dean," Mary said, feeling a bit guilty but as unwilling as John to admit she'd been behaving badly. She wanted answers yesterday, she wanted Nick alive to yell at, she wanted to be back home where the four of them could spread out more and not be on top of each other all the time.

She wanted to drag John into their bedroom, lock the door, and have a real, honest-to-God, loud, furious fight with him, swearwords included, that would end in hot angry sex.

Failing even that perfectly simple, uncomplicated desire (hah!), she really wanted to kill something.

As it was, Mary settled for blasting AC/DC and drumming her fingers on the steering wheel in time to the beat. Another stab of guilt went through her when she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Sammy curled up in his Daddy's jacket in the back, looking confused, and Dean's mutinous glare; but it still wasn't enough to get past that burning anger in her gut.

Jim was surprised to see them, but knew both Winchesters too well to ask just then, and set about shamelessly spoiling the boys instead. Dinner was steak and fries, and Sammy chattered at Jim all the way through it while Dean surreptiously fed Anubis his vegetables under the table and pointedly refused to talk to his parents as John poked rather viciously at his fries and Mary took a weird satisfaction out of the way her knife scraped through the meat on her plate.

After dinner, Dean demanded permission to take the dog for a walk, Sammy begged to go with and Jim decided he could do with the exercise as well, so Mary and John took the bags up to the guest rooms and had that fight.

Well, sort of. John had barely got past the opening round ("Look, I know you're pissed, but there's no need to take it out on the boys") when Mary decided that she couldn't be bothered to argue even that grossly unfair statement and just jumped him instead.

"This is not solving anything," he pointed out as he peeled her jeans and panties off.

"It'll wait," Mary retorted, sitting up and grabbing his belt buckle. "Right now I've got other things on my mind."

John grinned as his jeans joined hers on the floor and she leaned up to bite at his jaw, hands sliding up her thighs. "Such as..."

She pushed him off her onto his back on the big double bed and straddled his hips, reached up to pull her hair out of its tie. "Take forever to catch on, don't you, Win?" she drawled, inordinately pleased with the way his eyes blew open and his breath hitched at the sight of her above him.

Then he rolled them again, arms tight around her and all his weight on her so she couldn't move them back. "Well, if there's nothing in particular you're after..." and no one should look that gorgeously innocent while doing the things he was right then.

Gasp, arch up a little, clutch at his shoulders, curl her legs around him, take him in deeper, get her voice back _now_. "What?"

Warm wet mouth on her breasts, hands everywhere at once, eyes so dark with lust and love she couldn't even see the gold flecks in them anymore. "I guess that leaves it all up to me."

That was about when her brain finally, gloriously, ecstatically stopped working.

* * *

Several hours later, once the boys had been thoroughly hugged and tucked into bed (Dean trying and failing miserably to maintain an air of grown-up superiority during the proceedings) the three adults gathered round the kitchen table, made coffee, and started examining Nick's papers more closely.

"Whatever it was that killed them, I doubt your Mom knew about it," John said to Mary thoughtfully, hand resting on the Harrison's family tree. "Otherwise why would Nick be doing all this digging?"

"So it was Dad's fault," Mary said quietly.

"Fault is a bit much," Jim said quietly. "There are such things as family curses, for example. He might not have known a thing either; or if he did, it's not likely he could have done anything about it."

"What d'you know about his family?" John asked.

Mary shrugged a bit. "Not much. My grandmother died in childbirth with Dad; my grandfather was killed in the war, in Egypt. He was a Major, I think, under Montgomery. Dad wasn't old enough to enlist till 1945 and by then it was all over. Vicky and I came pretty late in their lives, I guess."

Jim was staring at her in surprise. He'd never heard that crisp English accent from her before.

"As for before that, I really don't know. Dad said once that at some point in the early 1800s one of his ancestors had packed up the family and moved from Glasgow to London, and that's where they'd stayed. Would have been... this guy. Henry Carmichael, born 1801."

"So your family's Scottish," Jim mused. "That might be a place to start."

"We've got half a dozen places to start, Jim," John said, somewhere between anger and exhaustion. "There's pages here torn from the book of Enoch, and a map of Wyoming next to a biography of Samuel Colt; this place Amherst in Massachusetts..."

Jim looked up sharply. "Sam Colt? Wyoming? Supposedly he owned large tracts of land there at one point."

"Which still doesn't have any connection to my Scottish family," Mary pointed out. "And the Harrisons have lived in Kansas time outta mind, Nick used to say."

"Says here Colt spent a year in England in the early 1830s," John said slowly. "What year did Henry Carmichael come to London?"

"I – I don't know – presumably still as a relatively young man," his wife said, surprised. "So he would've been in his thirties when Colt arrived – but still!"

"We know Colt was a hunter," Jim said. "Dan Elkins tell you about that magic pistol he was supposed to have built?"

"Yeah, he's obsessed with it," John said. "Are you suggesting it's real?"

Mary jumped in then, waving the papers with Colt's biography excitedly. "He patented the design for his repeater after he came back from England!"

"According to the legend, that was also the year he built the gun," Jim said. "Built it for another hunter."

She stared at him. "You're suggesting he built the gun for Henry Carmichael?"

John ran a hand through his hair. "How old was he at the time? Twenty? Someone would've needed to teach him how to create a pistol that can kill anything. Someone would've – my God."

"Someone would've had to teach him what was out there in the dark in the first place," Mary finished the thought for him.

Jim was fiddling with his favourite pen, tapping it against the tabletop as he spoke – the only sign of how excited he was. "Theory. Carmichael was a hunter. He met Colt somehow – probably saved him from something. Taught him the tricks of the trade. Then Colt came back to America, built the gun..."

"And that's where it all falls apart," John said. "Why?"

Depressed silence for a while. Mary drummed her fingertips on the map of Wyoming, studying it closely. "There's nothing here," she said rather disgustedly. "Nothing. It's all park and woods and graveyards. Interstate's about the only sign of civilisation there is!"

John took the map off her, studied it for a second. "Tell you what. Let's get in touch with Dan, see if he can tell us what land Colt owned, and then go check it out."

"Leave the boys with me," Jim said. "And for God's sake, be careful. I'm a good babysitter, but that's only because I know I can get rid of them again at the end of a week."


	3. interlude

_**AN: **"Interlude" taking place a few years after the end of the last chapter in the main storyline._

**Into this house we're born**

"You can't deny it's a lot quieter," John said, leaning back on his elbows.

"No..." his wife said slowly. "But... I mean... school starts in a week. And what exactly are we supposed to tell them? They'll think we've murdered them, or something."

"Let 'em think what they like. What're Social Services gonna do now, take 'em away?"

Mary scuffed her boots in the dirt and didn't say anything, mouth twisting a little. They were sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse, watching their sons chase each other round the yard, yipping and scuffling and acting like brothers.

Or puppies, which was the form they were currently in. Snuggly, wriggling, mock-fierce, bouncy, adorable puppies. John privately suspected they were in fact wolf cubs (a suspicion borne out by the fact that Anubis wouldn't go near them), but hadn't said so to Mary. She was worried enough as it was. Sam was all fluffy brown-grey shot with gold; Dean was bigger and heavier, pitch-black with startling green eyes. They splashed through a puddle and jumped over John's toolbox, sitting by the Impala. Sam growled and pounced at his big brother; Dean swatted at him with one paw, tumbling him to the ground without much effort, and pounced himself, pinning him. Sam squirmed and whined indignantly.

They weren't acting any different. They just... well, looked it.

"It was that witch, wasn't it," Mary said at last. "The one in Kentucky the other week."

"Dean swore by all that's holy it wasn't them who wrecked her garden," John said with a frown.

"She might not have believed him," Mary pointed out.

"But since when do curses wait weeks to take effect?"

Mary pursed her lips, thinking back over the last week. The witch in question had been summoning up her husband's spirit; in itself a spell Mary had some sympathy for, as she doubted she could survive thirty years without John either, but the fun ended when the dearly departed became homicidal. She'd smashed the woman's amulet herself, although not before hubby nearly trapped them all in the house and set fire to it. And then the woman's beloved garden had been trashed, presumably by local kids out to get at the crazy old lady in Nr. 132, but the witch had been convinced Dean and Sammy had done it.

Considering that their parents had just destroyed her husband, Mary couldn't really blame her for thinking that. John did. It took a lot to make him see an outsider's point of view where their sons were concerned. Mary was a bit more realistic.

_Fatuous adoration characteristic of their father_, she thought and then wondered where the Hell she'd read it.

Wrecked gardens...

"Dean! Sammy!"

The boys (well, not right now, obviously, but still) jumped up and ran to her. They still knew who they were, thank God. Sam tried to climb her leg to get on her lap; she reached down and lifted him up. He snuggled into her, tail hitting her arm, smelling of grass and puppy and damp fur. Dean sat down in front of her, tongue lolling out in a look scarily reminiscent of that arrogant smirk of his.

"Have you boys _done_ anything this week?"

Puzzled silence.

"You know. Anything illegal. Or at the very least, frowned upon in polite society. Wholesale property destruction. Terrorising of innocent civilians."

Sammy squirmed uncomfortably in her arms. Dean lay down in the dust, head on his front paws, looking up at her soulfully. John groaned.

"The thing at the swimming pool yesterday. That was you?"

Not that he was really expecting an answer. Mary sighed. They both did such a good job of looking apologetic and pathetic that she didn't have the heart to snap at them. "So the spell was triggered by the two of you being..."

"Winchesters," John murmured.

"Lawbreaking dangerous hellions," his wife said. "Which is pretty synonymous, I guess."

John winced. "Ouch."

Mary caught and held his gaze steadily; he grinned at her, totally unrepentant. Repentance wasn't really part of John's character. Sprawled on the old porch in the late sunshine, long legs stretched out in front of him, rolled-up sleeves hiding his Corps tattoo, he looked twenty years younger, the mischievous boy she'd never met, more like their sons than ever.

"So," he said. "Who wants to go back to Kentucky?"

Sam shot out of Mary's arms as if she'd thrown him; Dean jumped up, snarling, as his little brother scrambled behind him.

"That a no?" their father inquired.

"You wanna stay puppies," Mary said flatly.

Dean glared at her. Sam stayed crouched behind him. Their parents exchanged a long level look.

"Is this about school?" John asked bluntly. "Cause I'm the first to admit I hated high school for the most part, but it's a necessary evil. And you can't stay puppies forever."

The look on Dean's face suggested he was willing to try.

"I mean it. You're humans, not dogs. This sorta thing never ends well."

Still nothing.

"Dean," John said, leaning forwards intently, "don't for a second make the mistake of thinking I'm gonna respect your decisions on this one. You are my sons. I haven't spent the last thirteen years making sure you could protect yourselves against what's out there in the dark so you could spend the rest of your _greatly shortened_ lives eating off the floor and chasing your own tails. Do I make myself clear?"

Dean whined a little, lay down submissively. Sam looked like he wanted to argue, but joined his brother on the ground sulkily.  


* * *

  
"Are you sure about this trip?" Mary asked sleepily that night in bed. "They're awfully cuddly again now they're puppies."

Sam wagged his tail enthusiastically and snuggled in closer; Dean, lying below him between his parent's legs, rested his head on his Mom's knee.

"They're never gonna talk to me again one way or the other, so might as well," John said dryly.

Dean wriggled around, stepping over Sam carefully, and claimed a place in the crook of his Dad's arm, contrite and yawning.

"See?" Mary said. "This time next week, they'll be sulky unmanageable teenagers again."

"Jesus fuck," John said. "Whose side are you on?"

* * *

  
The next morning, Sam disappeared. Acres of farmland and a long stretch of woods behind them, a large old house full of nooks and crannies a small puppy could get into, outbuildings that were even worse... John and Mary tore the buildings apart first; they were getting a bit dangerous. No sign of Sam.

When they got back to the house a frantic half-hour later, Dean was gone too.

"I don't believe this," John snarled, furious. Worry over them always translated into anger with him.

"Win, what if they've - I don't know, lost their memories after all?" Mary asked, sick to her stomach.

Then there was a loud noise outside, a sort of scrabble across the porch, a yowl, a crash as something fell against the door. John jumped to open it, and there they were: two decidedly bedraggled-looking puppies tussling in the doorway. Dean had Sammy by the scruff of his neck, but he wasn't that much bigger than his brother, so Sam was nearly free.

John bent down and lifted him up in both hands, held him at eye-level. "The next time you run off like that, no matter what form you're in, I'll give you the kind of hiding my Dad used to dish out - the kind your mother made me swear never to give you," he said softly, voice quivering with pent-up anger. "Understand?"

Sam went limp in his hands. Mary kneeled in the hallway and gave Dean a squeeze.

Getting them into the car was a bit of a problem. Sam balked at it, whether out of continued stubbornness or new-found fear Mary didn't know. He snapped at her hand when she tried to lift him in, and in the end Dean grabbed him by the scruff of his neck again and lifted him inside. There was much scuffling and whinging and wriggling on Sam's part, but eventually, they were in the Impala.

"You'll get it back as soon as you've got the right limbs to drive it with," John told Dean when he whined a little at his Dad driving the Impala. "Until then, your mother and I are repossessing it."

Dean curled up in the back, a stretch of darkness and danger wrapped tight around the warm brown-grey bundle of his little brother.  


* * *

  
"Forget it," the witch said, glaring.

"For the last bloody time," John said. _"They didn't wreck your garden."_

"They wrecked something, or they wouldn't be in that state," she snapped.

There was no denying that one.

"Please," Mary tried. "How long do wolves live? You've taken forty years off their lives at least."

"You murdered my Horace," she said. "Now you can watch your precious brats die before their time. By the end, they won't even remember who they are."

Mary's nails digging into John's wrist were the only things keeping him from hitting her.

"That's the way you wanna play?" she said softly. "Fine. That's the way we'll go. Your Horace was killing innocent people. People I didn't even know, and as you yourself just pointed out, I murdered him for it. Imagine what I'm prepared to do to anyone who hurts my sons."

"You refused to kill me the last time you were here," the witch hissed.

"No," Mary said quietly. "John refused to kill you. I don't have his scruples."

"Change them back," John said. "Change them back or tell us how."

"Or else?" she sneered, but her voice quavered a little.

"You don't really wanna go there with either of us," he answered. "Trust me on that."

The witch watched them for another minute, glaring, muscles in her jaw working. Then she waved a hand, face set and angry. "I can take it off for now. But I warn you, I won't do it again. They've gotta behave themselves for another moon, or the transformation sets in again and _stays_."

"Oh, they'll behave themselves," John promised.  


* * *

The drive home was made in complete silence. Mary and John had taken turns lecturing their sons on the proper use of public swimming pools and how far they were allowed to push the whole rebellious teenager thing before it got old and dangerous, and then left them to stew. Dean sat squeezed in the corner behind the driver's seat, more introspective than remorseful, his mother suspected. Sam openly sulked.

When they pulled up in the front yard, he was the first one out of the car, and stomped off across the yard to climb up to the treehouse.

"Needs to work on his sulk," Dean said, just loud enough for his brother to hear.

"Need to get away from you!" Sam shouted without turning round.

"Works for me, you whiny little bitch!"

"Piss off!"

John slammed his door shut with a snarl. "Dean, get inside and shut up. _Not _necessarily in that order. Sam -"

"I'll take Sammy," Mary said. "Hey, Dean?"

He looked up at her silently, hands shoved in his pockets, digging his bare toes into the sparse grass around the Impala's accustomed parking space.

"Thanks for looking after him. You did good."

Wry little smile. John clapped him on the shoulder and handed him back the car keys. Dean full-on grinned at his Dad. They always did communicate better without words.

It had been a while since Mary had last climbed up to her son's treehouse, but even in the gloom, it only took her seconds.

Sam was sitting in a corner, sniffling miserably.

"Oh, Sammy. C'mere."

"Go 'way," he said, but didn't resist when she sat down by him and pulled him into a hug.

"Well? You gonna tell me why you ran off like that?"

It took a few minutes before he worked his way up to it.

"I just - I don't even know. I mean I do, but... it was easier, see? Everything was easier. There was just me and Dean and you and Dad and nothing else that mattered."

"Nothing else does matter, love," Mary said quietly.

Sam flung himself upright, angry and tearful. "But it does! Everything does. Other people matter. And school, and hunting, and - we've had two months holidays and we've spent a _week_ at home. A week! And there's the training, and the guns, and learning dead languages I'll never need and knowing stuff that's totally useless and stupid and that none of my friends can ever know about and lying and stealing and - and at least when we were little, one of you used to stay at home. Now you both go off and leave us and _I don't want this!"_

It took Mary a couple minutes to fill in the gaps in Sam's furious rant.

"OK," she said at last. "OK. I get it. No, I do. But Sam - no, just listen to me, love. You think your Dad and I don't want normal for you? You think we want to be travelling so much, want to have to leave you all the time?"

"If you don't want to don't do it," Sam said.

"Someone has to," Mary told him. "Someone has to face up to the truth and do something about it."

"But why us?"

"Because one night in 1983, I was nearly killed by one of those things," Mary said, for the first time a little sharply. "Sam. We don't know what it was. We don't know why it was there, why it targeted us. We don't know how to fight it if it comes back."

Little knot of guilt in her stomach, but it was essentially true. All they had was conjecture, a ritual they weren't even sure was genuine, and a few stories passed by word-of-mouth from drunken hunter to drunken hunter.

"We're not doing this for kicks," she said more gently. "We're doing this to protect you and Dean. And yes, other people matter. Do unto others, Sam. If there had been a hunter there that night I was attacked, we might not ever have needed to choose this life."

Sam sat in darkness, silent and huddled. Mary ran a hand through his tousled hair. "Come on inside and eat a meal at a table for a change," she teased.

He snorted a little, tension running out of him. "Yes, Mom."

Mary climbed down first, so she could catch him if he fell.


	4. interlude ii

**To the waters and the wild**

It glitters and sparkles, dances in the shadows. Dean grips the top of the fence and climbs up, carefully, fitting his feet into the uneven gaps in the wood. He braces himself on the top of the fence and stares fiercely into the woods, eyes narrowed in concentration. There - there. A tiny spark of light that twists and twirls and traces patterns in the air like a sparkler, and Dean bites down on his lower lip. It's so pretty, so funny! He's enchanted.

Watching it dance and skip and bob, he almost forgets to be angry - to hate everything - to glare and whine and drag his feet. He hates it here, hates it with all his heart. The house is huge and old and unfamiliar, and there's nothing for miles around, no neighbours, no other kids. He doesn't even go to preschool anymore.

Daddy loves it. Mommy is starting to. Sammy... well, Sammy cries a lot. Same as always. But Dean wants his bed and his room and all his toys, he wants the little crack in the plaster just above his head and the glow of his nightlight. He wants the carpet on the stairs that you can bump down on your bottom, sliding with a little thump from step to step straight into Daddy's arms. He wants a kitchen he knows and can find things in, and he wants the little bathroom with the blue stand under the sink that he tugs out by hooking his foot around the leg and hopping backwards so he can climb up and reach the grown-up soap.

Instead he's got wood and creaks and dust and stairs no one would ever bump down on their bottom. He's got a kitchen that's so big and dark he's a little afraid of it, and the door handle on his bedroom door is old and awkward and he can barely reach it. The barn and the sheds stare at him sightlessly with their empty windows like blind eyes, and everything feels so cold here.

So when Dean sees the little dancing lights, he's delighted.

Part of him wants to run inside, to catch Mommy's hand and drag her out to see, and she'd come running like Before, laughing and happy, but there's a whisper, a tinkle of sound, a breath of air that gusts his face and murmurs _no no not for grown-ups, no grown-ups here_.

Dean knows only one story that grown-ups aren't allowed to share in.

"Are you fairies?" he whispers. "Are you?"

The answer comes like the distant chime of tiny bells.

_If that's what you'd like, little boy, little human child. Little Dean._

"I'm not little! I'm awful big! I'm _five_."

Noise like far-off laughter. The lights are getting bigger, brighter, coming closer, all around him. They're beautiful, like the pretty necklaces Mommy used to wear Before, when she and Daddy went out some evenings, all dressed up so that they looked like familiar strangers.

_What are you doing out here all alone, not-little-Dean?_

"Playing," he says, sort of telling the truth. Mommy told him not to go outside, but Mommy's so busy with Sammy and boxes and unpacking, why would she care?

_Do you always play alone?_

"No," he mutters. "I never used to."

_So why now?_

"All my friends are miles and miles away."

_That's not nice. _

Dean shakes his head, miserable for the minute, but the lights are so lovely he soon forgets why.

_Would you like to play with us, not-little-Dean?_

His eyes widen, big and round. "With you?"

_Of course. We alway like to play with people. Especially boys who aren't little anymore. They're such fun! We'll have such fun, just you wait. Come and play, Dean._

For the first time, he hesitates. Didn't Mommy and Daddy used to say never to talk to strangers, or to go with them anywhere?

_We're not strangers! We're the People. The Good People. We're beautiful and lovely and fun, and we make everybody's lives much, much better. Everyone loves us. Your Daddy used to know us too, a long long time ago. He's forgotten, but we haven't. We never forget. He was kind to us then, and we will never forget it. We will have such fun, Dean! We'll play and laugh all day, all day, for ever and ever. Wouldn't Daddy want you to play and be happy?_

Dean bites his lip again, in consternation this time. If they knew Daddy -

_Come and play!_ the whisper comes again, and the lights get brighter, skipping around his head almost, shining and spinning. _Come and play, come with us, you'll soon see how much better it is than your life, your silly human life._

"Why silly?" Dean mutters. He thinks maybe this wasn't such a good idea, coming out here. He should have listened to Mommy.  
_  
Do you want to get old? Do you want to be big and clumsy and dull and boring and grown-up? Do you?_

"I - no -"

_Come then,_ they whisper. _Come and play._

Dean grips the fence a little bit tighter, draws a knee up to climb over it. This way, this way, they call out, dancing ahead and swirling back, laughing once more, clustering around trees and then flying apart to skim all around him. He hooks a knee over the fence and wobbles precariously, in danger of just falling down the other side like a sack of potatoes, but then suddenly there's arms around him, big strong hands that lift him up and pull him away from the fence.

"And where, exactly, did you think you were going?" Daddy wants to know. Dean gets a grip of his shirt and glares.

"To play with the fairies. No grown-ups allowed. Let me down!"

"Oh, I don't think so. There's jacket potatoes with bacon for dinner. Mommy wants to know if you're big enough yet to grate the cheese?"

Dean freezes up. Grate the cheese! Um. Well. The fairies... the lights are so pretty, and they said...

But on the other hand, there's jacket potatoes. And a cheese grater. And Daddy's smiling a little, slow and mysterious like he knows what Dean's thinking, and he's really really happy here, isn't he? Dean would feel awful if he took that away from Daddy. And someone has to look after Sammy, cause Mommy and Daddy always get the games wrong and they never know which toys he wants.

Still... "The fairies?" he asks.

"Tell you what," Daddy says. "Tonight, and every night after, we'll leave a saucer of milk by the back door for them. I used to do that when I was your age. There was this farmhand who worked here in summer once, he was from Ireland, and he told me to do it. If you're nice to them, they're nice to you, see?"

"They were being noce to me!" Dean protests as Daddy carries him inside.

"There's nice and there's nice," Daddy says, nudging the bathroom door open and putting Dean down on -

- a stool, a little wooden stool that's just the right height for him to stand on and reach up to the sink.

"Wash your hands and come grate the cheese," Daddy says. "If you like we'll paint it afterwards."

Dean giggles. "The cheese?"

Daddy rolls his eyes. "The stand, genius. Hurry up!"

Mommy shows him how to grate the cheese, slow steady strokes over the grater, very careful so he doesn't grate his hands instead. Dean grates a little pile and spreads it over his potato in triumph, waving the fork in his other hand. Sammy loves his high chair, messy little hands grabbing at his food despite Mommy's best efforts to teach him manners,a nd eventually, while Daddy just laughs and laughs, Dean puts his own cutlery down and wraps Sammy's little hands around his spoon firmly.

"Eat it with this," he tells his little brother firmly. "Then maybe I'll take you to see the fairies some day."

Mommy's biting on her lip hard, eyes bright and shining. Daddy stops laughing to watch.

Sammy scrunches his mouth up and frowns at Dean a minute. Then, spoon firmly gripped in both his hands like a two-handed broadsword, he dips it into his bowl and pokes around before withdrawing it with a lump of potato and bacon balanced awkwardly on it.

"Dee!" he says, beaming proudly.

Dean huffs. "You're supposed to eat it," he says irritably. Sammy frowns a bit.

"Dee," he says again, and takes one hand away from the spoon to lift the food off it and put it in his mouth.

Mommy and Daddy are laughing so hard Dean's surprised they can even breathe.

Daddy comes to get him at midnight. They creep downstairs and into the kitchen, lit up by moonlight. Daddy gets out the saucer, and lets Dean pour the milk into it. Then they open the back door, softly, softly, trying not to let it creak and wake Mommy or Sammy up. Dean steps into the yard in his pyjamas and boots, shivering a bit in the cool wind, and gently puts the saucer down by the big old table.

"I brought you some milk," he calls out softly. "And, um. Well, thank you. I'd love to come and play, really. Only, there's - there's other stuff I need to do too. Dad and Mommy and Sammy need looking after, see."

For a long time, there's nothing. He crouches there in the cool and stares into the night until his knees hurt and his eyes ache, feeling oddly disappointed and sad.

Then, there's a flicker in the trees, a far-off dance of light that might be fireflies... but isn't. If he strains his ears, he can hear a sound of far-off laughter.

Dean knows it's _goodbye_ and _thank you_ and _when you're done there, we'll be waiting. Or not._

Daddy locks the door behind them and bends to lift Dean up, but he shakes his head firmly.

"I know the way," he says.


End file.
